


We Are

by sibley (ferns)



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Minor Character Death, canon-typical child endangerment, post Episode: s05ep03 The Death of Vibe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-26
Updated: 2018-10-26
Packaged: 2019-08-07 18:03:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16413269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferns/pseuds/sibley
Summary: Cisco first hears about the phenomenon on the news. A woman with blond hair is reporting on a metahuman attack that was over before any of them had a chance to hear about it, the perpetrator incapacitated and tied to a street light with the rope from a nearby swingset of all things by an unknown assailant.As the news of Vibe’s death has circulated the city, citizens have turned to the streets and social media to express their sorrow. Stories of people seeing Vibe in action taking on criminals are numbering the hundreds. It seems Vibe saved many lives and inspired countless young people.





	We Are

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to ladybubblegum and Kathryn for answering my questions about what's going on on the Flash this season so I could properly write this. All violence and death is appropriate for canon, the only things not mentioned in the tags are brief and nongraphic mentions of antisemitic, homophobic, and transphobic violence.

Cisco first hears about the phenomenon on the news. A woman with blond hair is reporting on a metahuman attack that was over before any of them had a chance to hear about it, the perpetrator incapacitated and tied to a street light with the rope from a nearby swingset of all things by an unknown assailant.

It’s the third time that week that a criminal has been beaten by someone and left for the police, along with a nice pile of evidence. The first time it’s been a metahuman. He’s starting to think that there’s a new hero in town. Hopefully Cicada doesn’t go after them too, but honestly he’s sure they need all the help they can get.

Cisco is just taking another sip of what Iris calls his “signature ungodly mix” of caffeine and sugar and swirled foam when the camera pans over to the spray-painted symbol on the sidewalk: a white circle with a blue V.

Later, Barry brings it up. Suggests that it might just be someone who took the movie _V for Vendetta_ a little bit _too_ seriously. And then Cisco can’t stop himself from relieving every conversation that got him beat up in high school by getting into a long discussion about comics and comic book movies and also, at some point, queer themes and misogyny, while Iris gently tries to guide them back to the topic at hand. That’s really all that comes out of that.

Cisco doesn’t think much of it, even though there are a _many_ more instances. Always the same symbol, usually spray painted although once it was scribbled onto a piece of paper left taped to a woman’s forehead. The captures range from muggers and ATM thieves to Axel _goddamn_ Walker, and all of them tell different stories about who captured them, which means they’re all probably lying. To what end, none of them know.

Barry said that he and Joe and Captain Singh (Cisco likes that guy. He’s intimidated by him, but he likes him, and he thinks Singh likes him too, since a few weeks ago he patted his shoulder, looking strangely relieved, and said that he was happy to see that Cisco was okay) have formulated some theories that range from accidental breachers to permanent breachers-both of which Cisco shoots down, since he’d know if that had happened-to a wannabe vigilante on a lucky streak.

It’s not until Barry goes to intercept the same crime as the new force in Central City that they get something of an answer, even if it’s not one that anyone expected.

By the time Barry gets there, sliding to a halt in the snow outside of an ATM, the thief has already been taken care of, duct taped extensively to the ATM he was trying to rob, but the girl who stopped him is still there.

Yes, _girl,_ since she can’t be older than seventeen. She’s wearing a dark leather jacket that might be black, Barry can’t tell in the darkness, dark goggles, gloves, and sneakers. Her coily hair is tied in a tight ponytail, and he can’t see her expression because of the goggles. Barry wouldn’t even consider her to be a candidate for the vigilante taking care of people if she hadn’t been finishing up the duct tape.

“Hey,” Barry calls cautiously, vibrating his vocal cords just in case, “what do you think you’re doing?”

“Saving _you_ some trouble. I didn’t see you doing anything to stop this guy,” she hisses back, looking at something behind him that he doesn’t dare turn around to see. He can’t risk her trying to trick him. She applies another length of tape and then steps back, letting the darkness hide her a little bit more. Barry takes a step forward to match.

“I only just got here. I could have taken care of him,” Barry argues. He doesn’t want to arrest her-it’d be rather hypocritical of him, arresting someone for doing something that he does all the time. Something he’s practically made into his entire life at this point. Besides, she’s just a teenager. At most, he’ll figure out who she is and tell her parents that she’s been moonlighting as Central City’s newest crimefighter. “What’s your name?”

Her teeth flash into a huge grin as she answers him. “I’m Vibe.”

 _“...Excuse me?”_ Cisco says into his ear, and Barry jerks his head a little bit. Even after years, it’s startling to hear someone’s voice there when you’re not really expecting it. _“Did they just say that they’re…”_

“You’re not Vibe. Vibe is dead,” Barry lies. Maybe she’s delusional. Maybe he should be thinking about calling a hospital, not the police. “He was my friend.” It’s so _weird_ to talk about Cisco in a past tense when Barry can practically see him in his mind, on the edge of his seat and waiting to hear what this girl will say next. “You’re not him.”

“Yes, she is,” A voice says from behind him, and this time Barry can’t resist spinning around to see who-or _what-_ is there. A man is standing there, eyes gleaming pure radioactive green like a glow stick, also wearing a leather jacket. Barry can see that he has dark goggles too, they’re just pushed up onto his forehead. “And so am I.”

“And me!” A third, _much_ younger voice shouts from the top of a fire escape attached to the same building that the first girl, the first one claiming to be Vibe, is standing beside. The poor ATM thief looks as confused as Barry feels. Barry can’t see the source of this last voice, but his momentary disorientation is enough for the one with the glowing eyes to shoot a lime green blast from his forehead that knocks him on his ass and sends him skidding across the pavement.

By the time he sits up, only a few seconds later, both the girl and the man are gone, and when he checks the fire escape, nobody is hiding up there, either.

“What the _hell?”_ Barry wonders aloud, and the silence from the comms tells him that he’s not the only one who has no idea what’s going on.

By the time he gets back, ready to talk to his friends about how weird that was, Cisco is already on his feet, waving his arms in the air. Barry shouldn’t be surprised to see the massive grin on Cisco’s face. He is anyway.

“You know,” Cisco says before Barry can say anything, practically skipping across the room to poke him in the chest, “it’s _totally_ not fair that you got to meet them first.”

Barry opens his mouth to say “What are you talking about?” but Cisco’s already halfway across the Cortex again. He bounces off Ralph’s chest (Ralph seems to be only mildly put off by this) and spins around, beaming at nothing and nobody in particular.

“This is _so_ cool,” he sighs as he looks off into space.

“Cisco-” Barry gets interrupted again.

“Nope! You can’t ruin this for me!” Cisco looks like he doesn’t even feel the pain he was complaining about earlier anymore. “What were they like? We could hardly see anything on the security cameras, they were careful about those just like all the other times. I bet they’ve got someone who’s good with computers at their headquarters. Do they have a headquarters? Are there more of them? How come we didn’t _realize_ it was a team?”

Barry sits and rather hesitantly describes the one he didn’t see on the fire escape, the teenage girl with the tape, and the man with the glowing eyes and the green blasts that stung like hell. “He was a metahuman, at least. I don’t know about the other two. Or if there even _were_ two. Isn’t voice-throwing a thing?”

Cisco waves his bandaged hands. “It doesn’t matter. What _matters_ is that at least two, most likely three, and probably more people are going around inspired by _me._ Think about that for a second. How amazing is that? No, I don’t think child endangerment is okay, before you say anything because one was a teenager, but if there were a bunch of people taking justice into their own hands modeled after the Flash, you’d think it was pretty cool, wouldn’t you?”

Barry sputters and Cisco turns to Iris, who looks like she’s trying extremely hard to suppress her smile and give the illusion that she’s still on her husband’s side. “It is pretty cool,” Iris admits, “and a lot more productive than most public superhero mourning. And, Barry, you have to admit that they’ve made your job at least a little bit easier these past few weeks.”

Cisco could lose an argument against Barry. He had before. Many times. Some of them were about things as trivial as what movie they should watch, some of them were more serious, like the fights that they’d had after Dante disappeared. But Iris? No way in _hell_ could Barry lose a real argument against Iris. he deflates a little and nods slowly. “With people taking care of some of the petty crimes,” he says reluctantly, “it’s easier to focus on Cicada and other metahuman criminals.”

“Exactly. In a few more weeks, they’ll probably get tired of it, and you’ll have to go back to handling everything yourself.” Cisco seems to be visibly restraining himself from saying anything else, holding back laughter. “We’ll see how much you’re complaining about them then.”

But they don’t go away. In fact, the crimes stopped by the, as Cisco had taken to calling them, ‘Junior Vibe Crew’ only grow in number. Privately, Cisco assumes that as their group gets bigger, they have the opportunity to stop more crimes, since their group effort means that they can literally be in multiple places at once.

He hasn’t tried to vibe them yet, and not because he doesn’t have anything of theirs like he told Barry. Cisco’s powers have long grown out of needing a physical tie to see someone’s actions. Honestly, it just felt like an invasion of privacy. At least some of these people are teenagers. Cisco has _no_ interest in spying on teenagers.

But… He’s curious. Barry doesn’t have to know if he just takes a peek, just enough to see how many people they’ve got with them these days. He won’t tell anybody. Cisco values what they’re doing-it’s true that Barry has really only been focusing on metahuman issues these days, not on human crime. Whether he just doesn’t have the time to deal with it or thinks it’s beneath him and that the actual cops can handle it, Cisco doesn’t know. Which means that these people are helping! They’re getting criminals off the streets! Surely it’s not a crime to just take a look at what they’re doing, right?

Except after he vibes them, a group of shadowy figures all outfitted in leather jackets and dark goggles (though his vision does reveal that they’ve all painted the letter _V_ onto the backs of their jackets, which Cisco thinks is very cute) standing around a map of Central City with a smaller map of Keystone beside them, he can’t resist going to their location.

Dressed in his new Vibe gear. Using his extremely vibe-y powers to get there. What? They’re modeled after him! He’s not going to go as boring old Cisco Ramon. Just because Vibe is supposed to be dead, that doesn’t _mean_ anything. Superheroes come back from the dead in Star City all the time.

It’s only when he sees about twenty shocked faces all turned in his direction that he realizes that maybe this wasn’t the _best_ idea he’s ever had.

He’s not sure what reaction he was expecting. Honestly, he didn’t really think this through. He just wanted to talk to them, ask them why they chose him, and… Maybe see if they need any help in the tech department while he’s at it.

Cisco certainly was _not_ expecting to be immediately swarmed by six year olds.

There are about three of them, it’s kind of hard to tell when they’re tackling you-one with poofy hair bigger than their entire face, one who seems to be a walking pink palette (everything from her light up sneakers to her hijab are varying shades of pink, going from pastel to eye burning), and one who’s missing their two front teeth and has more freckles per square centimeter of skin than anybody else Cisco has ever seen. He goes down immediately, trying very carefully not to hurt them.

The older people in the room seem to get over their shock relatively quickly, and one of them, a girl of about seventeen who might have been the one that Barry met first, runs forward to help him to his feet, mindful of the kids clinging to him and chattering loudly. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Vibe Sir,” she says, sounding like she’s trying to contain her own excitement. “Um-please don’t be mad, they’re just kids.”

“Of course not.” He’s not sure why they think he’s the real Vibe and not an imposter. Well. He _is_ the real Vibe, the one and only, but if someone looking like him showed up somewhere after he was presumed dead, he would think they were faking it. He kneels back down, looking at the little cluster. Pink Girl seems to be the bravest, while the one with the missing teeth is hiding behind her. “Hey there.”

“Are you really Vibe?” Pink Girl asks solemnly, dark brown eyes as big as dinner plates. “Me n’ Jasey n’ Shay are Vibe, too.”

Cisco gets a sinking feeling in his stomach. Teenagers endangering themselves is one thing. But these kids can’t be older than seven. He holds out his hand for her to shake, which she does, tiny fingers squeezing his gloved ones. “Yeah, I’m really Vibe. It’s nice to meet you.”

“Zainab, why don’t you go tell the boss about this? She’ll want to know that Vibe is here,” the Vibe-who-Barry-met-first suggests, and Pink Girl (who must be Zainab) brightens immediately, grabbing onto Jasey and Shay’s hands and running off without saying anything else. She sighs and looks at Cisco. “Kids.”

“Kids,” he agrees, before saying after a moment of hesitation, “you’re not letting _them_ get involved in this vigilante group thing, are you? I can’t really tell you what to do, but if you’re putting little kids in danger…”

“Of course not!” She looks offended that he’d even suggest it, which is good. “We’re trying to be-we _are_ heroes, we wouldn’t put little kids in danger. They’ve all got a parent or sibling in the group who wants to keep an eye on them, though, so we let them help out with some of the non-offensive stuff. Painting the jackets and handing out equipment and things like that.”

He’s vaguely aware of the loose semicircle of people all watching him with unabashed admiration. It’s definitely an ego booster. One of them, a guy of about forty who seems to be one of the oldest people there, dressed just like everyone else (only the kids and the few people he can see sporting injuries aren’t in what must be their uniform), looks at him hard. “So you’re not really dead?”

“I almost died. It’s… It’s a long story. I didn’t stop being a hero because I wanted to, or because it got too hard. A lot of stuff just compacted in my life, and then I almost got killed, and some people thought it would be safer for me if the person who tried to kill me thought that I was really dead.” Cisco pauses. “It’s _really_ confusing when you say it out loud.”

“How do you know all of us are trustworthy? That we won’t tell whoever it is that tried to kill you that you’re still alive?” A smooth and familiar voice that feels like a stab in the back says from behind him.

Of course, Cisco knows that everyone should have a doppelgänger, unless there’s a reason for them not to. Barry’s Jewish, hence no Earth-X double, for example. And some worlds are out of tandem with theirs, meaning that you might have already died years ago or not even been born yet. But that doesn’t make it any easier to meet yourself from another Earth, or meet someone you fought on another Earth who is a potential ally here in this reality, or…

Once he turns around, it takes a few seconds to get his mouth and brain working in synch again. A few seconds for his heart to calm down, to settle back in his chest from where it has crawled up into his mouth. “Well, are you going to?”

The Cynthia Reynolds of Earth-1, who’s holding Zainab’s hand, smiles at him. She’s identical down to the last freckle, but her eyes aren’t as hard, and they don’t have the red rings inside the iris that _his_ Cynthia did. Does. Whatever. Minus the goggles, she’s dressed like everybody else. “No, of course not, but you didn’t know that.” She smiles wider. “Trust back in us is nice to see. You inspired us. We’re not going to tell anybody we saw you here, right guys?”

A murmur of agreement passes through the small crowd, which mostly disperses as she moves closer to him. Cisco tries not to take a step forward. He can’t let her know that he knows one of her doppelgängers. She probably doesn’t even know that the multiverse theory is true, he can’t just spring that on someone. It’s not fair to her. Harry was a colossal dick to him because Harry is a colossal dick to _everyone,_ not because Earth-2 Cisco was an asshole. “Hey. I’m Vibe. Which you know.”

“Yes, I do.” Her shoulders shake with laughter. Zainab rolls her eyes and slides her hand out of Cynthia’s and runs off somewhere with her friends. Cisco looks anywhere but at her. He’s sure she’s very nice, and technically she’s a completely different person, it’s just _weird._ Especially since the breakup is so fresh in his mind. “All of us here know you, even if you don’t remember us. Come on, I’ll show you around.”

He follows, footsteps uncomfortably loud on the wooden floors. “So you’re the leader here?”

“Kind of. I started this, and my foster dad is the one who owns this whole place, so I’m sort of the one in charge when it comes to big decisions, but we try to make everyone’s voices heard.” She nods to a side hallway-this place is a lot bigger than Cisco had first thought. “The bedrooms for the people who actually live here are down that way, but we’re not going down there.”

Cisco pauses and blinks. The people who _live_ here? “You have permanent residents?”

“Some people who work with us can’t go home. Some got kicked out for being metahumans, for being gay, for being transgender, usually a combination. We’ve only got about five, since Angelica and her girlfriend just moved out. It’s not _really_ permanent, since they’re always planning to find somewhere else to stay, but we do what we can,” Cynthia explains.

Cisco looks around, impressed. A woman of about thirty with dyed red dreadlocks is watching him from a doorway, dressed like everybody else, with her arm in a sling. They must have first aid services here, then. Being a vigilante is painful work. She bites her lip and looks away when Cisco accidentally makes eye contact, flustered. “You’ve done all of this since I ‘died’?”

“We’d been planning it for a long time before that, and had some stuff set up here already,” she admits. “But when you died, everybody started coming out of the woodwork to try to do some good in your honor. They didn’t need me to tell them to do that. I just gave them some organization and direction, and recruitment whenever somebody new shows up without the right equipment. Watch your step around here, Yoora never picks up their pencils and it’s easy to slip.”

She isn’t actually much like his Cynthia at all, Cisco realizes. Less scars. Shorter hair. She walks with the same slight limp but she doesn’t look at everyone they pass like they’re going to bite her. The V on her jacket is red, which is different from the blue and white of the rest of them, but Cisco doesn’t comment on it. “This is really cool. The Flash has been kinda upset about all of this, but I’m… Really, really flattered.”

Things start to blur as more people come out to stare at him and introduce themselves, some hesitantly asking for autographs while others tell him practically their entire life stories.

The girl who Barry met, who says that he can call her Nessie (yes, like the Scottish lake monster). A kid with literally blue skin and pure white eyes who excitedly announces that their name is Maxie and that Cisco is their _absolute favorite superhero ever in the world._ Megan, a private detective who claims she’s only here so the rest of them don’t die. Mazin, with four eyes, two where they should be and two on their cheeks. Even Cisco’s high school ex boyfriend, Benny, who thankfully doesn’t recognize him. And so many more.

It’s kind of amazing to be treated like a celebrity. Cisco hadn’t thought that anybody really cared about Vibe. Sure, it probably mattered that he was there to the people he’d saved, but they probably would have rather been saved by the Flash, not by him. But here were all these people saying that they had missed him. That they were glad he wasn’t dead. People who wanted _him_ to be proud of them. Not the Flash or the Green Arrow. _Him._ They looked up to him.

That was something special, wasn’t it?

So maybe he doesn’t tell Barry about it. And maybe he goes back. Builds them some things. Adjusts the night vision goggles they all wear. Makes some stuff for the kids. Helps find Maisie and her twins a new place to stay. He’s only seen the building from the outside a few times, and he’s never met Cynthia’s foster father, the guy who owns it, but if he’s anything like the dad of the Cynthia he knows (although…he does kind of know both of them, now, doesn’t he?) he’s perfectly fine with that.

They’re still tagging whenever they catch a criminal, so it’s not like they’re hiding who’s doing it, so Cisco’s not doing anything _wrong_ by not telling Barry that he’s been spending time with them. That they’re actually pretty fantastic people, even the kids. Especially the kids. That the girl who watched him get his ass kicked is shaping up to be a fine prospective engineer. That the guy who actually blasted him was so nervous about getting Cisco’s autograph that he threw up. That the kid on the fire escape was a nine year old who snuck out of his apartment to watch.

He doesn’t need to tell them that he’s making things safer for the vigilantes Barry’s now semi actively competing with. That he actually called Curtis in and asked for _his_ help with a few things. Of course Barry doesn’t notice that a lot of the same tech that he uses, whether for communication purposes or to shield his identity or to protect his safety, ends up with the Vibe gang. Why would he?

It’s not like Cisco’s trying to hide what he’s doing on purpose. Really, he’s not. They could just _ask_ him if he was helping the Vibe vigilantes. Maybe he’d lie, maybe he wouldn’t. But they have the same goal of reducing crime in Central City and Keystone to a lesser extent, so he’s kind of helping the STAR Labs team, too, isn’t he? (Cisco knows he’s just rationalizing going behind the backs of his friends, but he doesn’t particularly case.)

He’s not even doing anything really wrong, is he? He’s helping people. He can’t be Vibe anymore, not while Cicada is still around, but that doesn’t mean that _they_ can’t be. They want to be heroes. They want to be like him. Why _shouldn’t_ he help them do that? He can help them minimize injuries, help them somewhat with hand to hand (unlike seemingly everyone else, he actually learned _some_ stuff about self defense) though not as much as the other people they have teaching them, help them with tech…

Honestly, he feels more at home and more useful with the Vibe gang than he does at STAR.

They look up to him. He’s their hero. They need him, but even if they didn’t, they’d still want to have him around. Can he really say the same thing for the people at STAR? They’re his friends, or at least they used to be, but things have been even more chaotic lately, with Nora and Caitlin trying to figure out all that stuff with her dad and everything. It feels like nobody even notices that he’s gone when he goes to spend time with the Vibe crew.

So he’s fine with not telling them. Totally fine. Totally, one hundred percent fine. He just shows up to STAR Labs and talks to his friends and does what needs to be done and then leaves to go do what he actually wants to do. What’s wrong with that? Again, he’s not _really_ lying. He’s just omitting some harmless truths.

It goes fine, for awhile. Longer than Cisco was expecting. The crew has become something of a huge operation at this point. Almost thirty people with over a dozen doing actual vigilante work. Not one of their people has been caught by the CCPD yet, which is actually kind of weird. He wonders if Cynthia has plants there, or if the police force really is just that incompetent. He really of hopes it’s the former. He’d rather have a police force that’s corrupt in their favor than an incompetent one.

And then Cicada goes after one of his people.

Cynthia texts him about the distress call as soon as she receives it, but by the time they get there, the target of the attack is already dead. Cisco’s stomach knots when he sees the corpse, and remembers the young guy who blushed whenever he walked in and answered his questions mostly in squeaks, much to the amusement of his older sister.

 _Aspen,_ wasn’t it? Or was it Ash? A tree name. Pyrophosphorous powers. He definitely remembers that. He feels awful for not remembering more.

Cicada is still there. It takes Cisco a second to register that he’s looking at him. To remember that Cicada thinks he’s dead. To remember that he is so, so royally fucked. He looks at maybe-Aspen’s face, twisted in terror, fingers still audibly sizzling from when he must have tried to blast Cicada to defend himself. It’s not fair. None of this is fair.

The blast throws Cicada back a foot, but at that point he’s already thrown his knife. Cisco tries to dodge but it sinks into a soft spot under his ribs. He remembers that awful dragging trick but he’s in too much pain to do anything to stop it. It hurts so badly, like the knife is heating up inside of him, and his ears are full of that horrible clicking noise.

It’s enough pain for him to see things that definitely aren’t there. Things that can’t be real. Things like tentacles reaching down to grasp Cicada from an unknown vantage point, the ground opening up to swallow him, lava splitting the cement and somehow leaving poor Aspen’s body untouched on the ground.

Except Cicada is definitely seeing it too, and this time the knife pulls _up_ and scrapes against his ribs and then _out_ of his skin when he calls it to defend himself. Cisco’s pretty sure that made the pain and the bleeding about a million times worse. Hands press down onto the injury, applying steady pressure.

“Got you, Vibe,” Cynthia’s voice says in his ear, and when he meets her eyes they’re glowing pure pale red. Smoke spills down from her eyelids like when you put dry ice in water. “My illusions won’t distract him for long, but it might be enough to get you and Aspen out of here. You need a hospital, we’re not equipped for stab wounds.”

“Thanks, Vibe,” he rasps out, which is about when the Flash shows up, along with Nora (of course) outfitted in her Tornado gear and Ralph, who is dressed like he should but clearly couldn’t be bothered to find the mask. Evidently, they can’t see the illusions that Cicada is hacking and stabbing at, and when Cisco blinks, he can’t see them either. He spots one of Iris’s friends pointing a camera directly at Cicada, though, which is probably going to make the guy’s life extremely difficult.

Unfortunately, that’s about the time that Cynthia falters, and that must mean that her illusions fade, since Cicada is now fixated on him again. _Great._ What the hell is up with this guy and specifically wanting _him_ dead, anyway? There’s probably over a thousand metahumans still in Central City alone. Not that Cisco wants those ones to die, either, of course, but…

“Help Vibe,” Barry hisses to Ralph as he and Nora circle Cicada. Nora looks like she might be about to throw up. “Make sure he can’t get to him.”

Ralph awkwardly jumps back a couple of paces away from Barry and then drops to his knees beside him. “Hi, Vibe. That’s a lot of blood.” Cisco _strongly_ resists the urge to yell _oh, I hadn’t noticed._ “Here, let me-” He takes over pressing duty and pulls Cisco closer, which gives Cynthia the chance to conjure a handful more illusions. Unfortunately, at this point Cicada’s learned what’s real and what’s not, which sucks ass. Cisco tries to sit up, which just causes more excruciating pain. Ralph yelps. “Careful!”

“It should be just a little bit longer,” Cynthia says anxiously, eyeing the tops of the buildings around them. With her bloody nose from overexertion of her powers and her set jaw and narrowed eyes, Cisco thinks she looks like she should. “Just a little while longer, okay? If they can keep his attention for just a little bit more…”

“Until what?” Cisco croaks. Ralph’s applying quite a bit of pressure, but the blood isn’t stopping. It actually doesn’t hurt so much anymore. Just a dull ache where there was searing pain. Maybe the injury isn’t actually _that_ bad. He could probably still be out there, helping Barry and his daughter.

Someone _screams_ from above them, and about a dozen and a half Vibes jump out onto the dock.

“Until that,” Cynthia says, tired but satisfied.

Nessie’s in the lead with Megan just behind her. Megan’s got her arm looped around a struggling girl dressed in their uniform whose fingers are dripping with electric green acid. With a sinking feeling in his chest, Cisco recognizes Aspen’s sister. The rest of them are fanned out. Some of them are staring at Aspen’s body and watching Cicada nervously. Some of them are watching the Flash. Nessie is openly checking Nora out.

Barry’s nervously watching the guy who hit him last time, who jokingly calls himself Glowworm like he’s a ‘90s Marvel villain, which gives Cicada a chance to stab him in the arm. Nora body slams him out of the way before he can call his knife back and, like they’ve been training together for years, lets Nessie manipulate the water around them to slam Cicada against the concrete before rushing forward to kick him in the head. He pulls the knife back before she can jump away and stabs her ankle to drag her down, and then-

And then Cicada gets mobbed. Aspen’s sister, Ivy, burns holes in his skin as she screams her brother’s name, and Megan crunches his shoulder with the baseball bat Cisco’s been trying to discourage her from carrying. Cisco stands, then, which makes Ralph start fussing, and throws a few blasts into the mix, targeted at Cicada’s vibrations. Nora lands a few punches at superspeed and Barry joins in, and for a glorious moment it’s just _too many_ for Cicada to fight all at once.

Until he gets his knife back and starts slashing at random, shield bubbling up. They draw back as one, and Cisco feels like he could cry. He loves these people, doesn’t he? These people who love him.

Cicada’s not dumb. He’s clearly getting ready for a retreat, and they can’t have that, can they? So Cisco blasts the ground beneath him and feels the cement shake, a _real_ earthquake this time, not one of Cynthia’s fake ones. He loses his footing and stumbles backward just as one of the shadows steps from the building and slips around behind him onto what looks like the edge of the dock, that skill that the Vibe crew has mastered so well.

Cloaked in shadow, the figure raises something, and the gunshot that rings out practically Cicada’s ear is enough to get him to turn around even though he wasn’t actually shot, only to be rushed again by a crowd of furious vigilantes.

Barry stops the crew from killing him, which Cisco would argue against if he still had the energy, and to stop him from running while Barry’s back is turned since they can’t just bring him to the Pipeline or whatever Cisco _rips_ into his vibrations with everything he still has, leaving him writhing on the ground.

Cisco Ramon was born to bring down gods, after all. It’s about time he finally did.

The next few minutes are a jumble, probably because of the blood loss.

The Vibes stay, clustered together around Aspen’s (Cisco’s sure that’s his name, now) body while they let Ivy grieve. Barry and Nora say they’re taking Cicada to the station, which means that _Barry_ is while Nora realizes at the last second that she can’t be seen by the police in this timeline, at least not up close. Ralph is not letting the fact that he’s covered in Cisco’s blood and is still pressing against his wound deter him from hitting on a very confused and flustered Glowworm. Cynthia does a quick injury assessment.

When Cisco finally almost falls flat on his face, the Vibes _(his_ Vibes, he kind of wants to call them) swarm him, pressing against his sides to keep him upright. Nora _finally_ comes back and says she’s going to bring him to a hospital. Apparently the stab wound was _way_ bigger and a lot worse than he had thought. What? Cisco wasn’t a doctor. He does manage to give Nora a thumbs up before he passes out, though.

Recovery is slow. His other injuries hadn’t fully healed yet, and he can _feel_ that Caitlin is fuming at him for doing this, which he supposes he kind of deserves. Barry’s mad at him, too, for going behind his back and almost dying and not telling him that he was working with the Vibe crew. Iris seems to have mostly forgiven him-she says that it was stupid, and once he got stabbed he should have gone to the hospital immediately, but she understands why he did it and she would have done the same thing.

The Vibe crew sneak into his hospital room (yes, a real hospital) to see him. Cynthia and Nessie and the little kids, mostly. Shay likes to read picture books to him, which he doesn’t mind at all. Ivy comes, once. He lets her cry on his shoulder without saying anything else until she leaves. They won. But she lost.

It’s a whole _month_ before Caitlin lets him out of her sight long enough for him to breach outside all by himself. He sits on the roof of Jitters at one of the tables they have set up there, enjoying the last rays of sunshine.

Iris finds him up there. “Nora saw you while she was going for a run. I brought you lemonade-no, I won’t tell you how to get them to give you lemonade, it’s only for friends of the baristas. How does it feel being in the land of the living again?”

Cisco smiles at her and says “It feels really good” because he knows that even if it’s only half true, it’s what she wants to hear. “I’m mostly just glad to be out of the hospital. And out of my house. Don’t tell Caitlin I was up here, by the way.”

“I won’t,” Iris promises with a little laugh. “Happy to be back as Vibe?”

Cisco smiles and nods and looks at the city lit by the sunset and tracks the distant shadowy figures running across the rooftops by their vibrations instead of with his sight and doesn’t say that while he’s happy to be back, Vibe never left Central City.

Not for a second.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm augustheart on tumblr.


End file.
